(E) Milosevic: Watch out for this on PBS - How to be a dictator on BBC
HOW TO BE ADICTATOR
The following doucumentary was screened on BBC Four last week. It was superb, no "all sides guilty" here. Indeed, by the end it effectively blamed the Serb people as a whole.
There is one scene which was JNA footage overflying devastated Vukovar, cutting back and forth with drivel from Milosevic's wife; the footage was the most striking I have seen of the devastation wreaked by the JNA.
Lots in this programme. It was co-produced with WNET, so it should be available on US PBS TV. Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all.
Leslie Woodhead and Paul Jenkins spent six months filming in Belgrade in order to reconstitute the career of Slobodan Milosevic. The man who is now on trail at The Hague for genocide proves to suffer from what witnesses refer to as a kind of autism. It is extremely hard ever to pin down what he did, but he proved able to exercise dictatorial powers over his country and also to wage a series of catastrophic wars that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and many hundreds of thousands of deaths. This is a totally chilling film, made with the rigour and compassion that one has come to expect from Leslie Woodhead. It is not always easy viewing, but it does offer a definitive account of the blackness at the heart of Europe in the past decade.
